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I could hear the clinking and clanking, and the creaking of the pulley-blocks just as before, only not quite so loud. "Well," thought I, "it is a strange crew, working thus all night long. Ha! on second thoughts, perhaps it is a fresh set who are at it another watch that has relieved the former one?" This was probable enough, and the conjecture satisfied me.
There were shops selling quaint articles, smoky shanties where sailors were cooking their own queer messes, dealers in pipes, monkeys, parrots, ropes, sailcloth, fanciful curios, amongst which were mingled higgledy-piggledy old culverins, huge gilded lanterns, worn-out pulley-blocks, rusty flukeless anchors, chafed cordage, battered speaking-trumpets, and marine glasses almost contemporary with the Ark.
In one way this ship of Mr. Carville's was novel to me. There was about her decks no noise of cranes lifting cargo, no open hatchways, no whiffs of steam or screaming of pulley-blocks, with huge bales of merchandise swinging in mid-air.
He is then placed upon the fourth table, with ceremonies and the offering up of prayers: the table is hung up in a wonderful manner by means of four ropes passing through four cords attached to firm pulley-blocks in the small dome of the temple. This done they cry to the God of mercy, that He may accept the offering, not of a beast as among the heathen, but of a human being.
But he does this by means of pulley-blocks attached to shears built on the vessel which is to transport the block, and he contrives to lift the weight without putting upon his chains the extra strain due to the friction of the numerous pulleys over which they pass.
He is then placed upon the fourth table, with ceremonies and the offering up of prayers: the table is hung up in a wonderful manner by means of four ropes passing through four cords attached to firm pulley-blocks in the small dome of the temple. This done they cry to the God of mercy, that he may accept the offering, not of a beast as among the heathen, but of a human being.
But, to my companion, a shortish, thick-set man, with a masterful air and a bowler hat very much over one eye, these marvels were an everyday affair; and now, ducking under a steel hawser, he led me on, dodging moving trucks, stepping unconcernedly across the buffers of puffing engines, past titanic cranes that swung giant arms high in the air; on we went, stepping over chain cables, wire ropes, pulley-blocks and a thousand and one other obstructions, on which I stumbled occasionally since my awed gaze was turned upwards.
And this was an adventure of which he had dreamed from boyhood: aboard a windjammer on the South Seas. There were mysterious sounds, all of them musical. There were swift actions, too: a Kanaka crawled out upon the bowsprit to make taut a slack stay, while two others with pulley-blocks swarmed aloft. Occasionally the canvas snapped as the wind veered slightly.
This is not always the case, and depends very much on the character of the mate himself; but on board the Inca the discipline did not appear to be of the strictest. What with the clatter of tongues, the "skreeking" of pulley-blocks, the rattling of boxes against each other, the bundling of trucks over the staging, and other like sounds, there was more noise than I had ever heard in my life.
They fix pulley-blocks to the trees, lay sliding planks down into the water, fasten a rope to one end of the steamer, and take the other end through the block attached to the tree and thence back aboard a second steamer; then they carry a rope similarly from the other end through the block on the second tree, and aboard a third boat.
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